The Syntax of Things
by Kyra Cullinan
Summary: Fudgesicles and coping. Dawn/Anya.


The Syntax of Things  
  
Kyra Cullinan (kyrac@sympatico.ca)  
  
Dawn/Anya, because I wanted to see if I could make it work. Did I? Did I   
not? Feedback is better than ice cream in July.  
  
DISCLAIMER: Joss owns the characters, e.e. cummings owns the poem   
(http://www.plagiarist.com/poetry/?wid=333) from which the title is taken,   
I own an overactive imagination.  
  
SPOILERS: Through 'Grave'.  
  
*  
since feeling is first  
who pays any attention  
to the syntax of things  
will never wholly kiss you;  
*  
  
Dawn's neck feels startlingly bare with her hair off it. Braided and pinned on top of her head, it brings a welcome if brief respite from the heat. She brushes her fingertips against the nape of her neck, concentrating on the strange intimacy of her own skin.  
  
The air conditioning is another casualty of the oh so special Summers Summer Budgeting Project. The opression of Southern California in July makes her feel drained, vaguely miserable but devoid of the energy to be actively cranky. She curls her bare toes against the linoleum of the kitchen floor, seeking whatever coldness it has to offer, wondering how many cool showers a day she ought to allow herself. Somewhere outside, a lawnmower drones into the still, stifling air. There's nothing to do; it's been nearly a month since she turned sixteen and all her birthday money is long spent. She wishes they had a pool. She wishes Xander still worked in an ice cream truck. She wishes she were in England with Willow and Giles, where she knows it's just got to be cooler than here.  
  
Something cold on her foot makes her blink and look down. Ice cream. Her fudgesicle is melting, liquifying into what she supposes is its natural sticky brown state, dripping down the side of her hand to drop onto the floor. She mutters a curse under her breath and hurries to the sink, holding it over the stainless steel where any further meltage will be more easily contained. Anya looks up from her seat at the counter as she swears, but doesn't say anything, turning back to the wholesale magic supply catalog she's leafing through. She seems to have an unending supply of them lately, conveniently producing one wherever she goes. When Dawn had asked her why the sudden interest, she shrugged.  
  
"I'd gotten so used to looking at bridal catalogs, I needed something to replace them. I suppose it might have been real estate brochures or clothing for infants if ... things had turned out differently," she said, looking away, and Dawn hadn't asked again. Actually, Dawn considered, Anya might literally be pulling them out of thin air, for all she knows. She's more than a little sketchy on exactly what powers a vengeance demon has at her disposal. Either way, the catalogs seem to be doing the trick, providing a buffer between her and the rest of the Scoobies during whatever contact proves necessary in the uneasy truce they seem to have come to. Buffy and Xander are worried about her loyalties as a demon and though they pretend not to, they keep throwing suspicious glances at her in a way which reminds Dawn of how they treated her when they found out she was the Key. Mostly, she's decided, Anya just looks sad.  
  
Her fudgesicle is still dripping merrily away and she stares, transfixed, at each tiny chocolate blob sprinkled across the sink's chrome. She should probably finish it before it all melts away, but she didn't really want it in the first place, just something to cool her down. Behind her, Anya sets down her glass of iced tea with a clink and crunches another ice cube. It's a good idea, but Dawn hates the feeling of ice breaking between her teeth, the strange combination of solid shards and melting liquid it makes in her mouth.  
  
In the sink, the brown spots look like tears, like the ice cream is crying its life away. Dawn closes her eyes and thinks 'or sweating'.  
  
When she opens them again, she can see her reflection in the window above the sink, the faintest of outlines and she looks without blinking at her own solemn face and the braids crisscrossing above it. Tara used to wear her hair like this. She taught Dawn how to do it one day last summer, sitting cross-legged behind her on the bed, mouth full of bobby pins while Dawn giggled at the tickle of fingers ghosting across the back of her ears, on the curve of her shoulders. She squeezes her eyes shut against the memory, taking a shaky breath. Her whole body is tired of crying, not for the moment, but deep in its cells, weary from an entire year and a half of grief, and she steadies herself on the edge of the counter with her free hand.  
  
'I don't know how to do this,' she thinks, and then almost laughs, because of course she doesn't and yet it keeps happening. You'd think, though, that she would've figured it out at least a little by now. And Tara wasn't her mother, or her sister, but she was the one person who'd been there to hold her after both of them had died, and now she was gone too and so what's Dawn supposed to do now? She wonders, sometimes, in the part of her mind which refuses all logic, who'll die next.  
  
"Why doesn't it get easier?" she says suddenly to the room, without moving. In the bright window, she can barely catch the movement of Anya looking up. "I mean, shouldn't we be able to get ... sadness calluses or something?"  
  
"I don't know, Dawn," Anya says from behind her, her voice frank. "I thought it would. When Joyce died, when it didn't make any sense, I thought 'Well, at least now I'll know for next time, I'll figure it out now.' But I didn't. I couldn't. I still don't understand. It hurt just as much when Buffy died, and Tara, but different each time. Always in different ways. I wish it got easier."  
  
The half-melted ice cream is making little pools in the sink, sweet brown puddles which remind her of chocolate milkshakes and Tara's laughing eyes. Suddenly her mouth is heavy with the ice cream's sickly-sweetness clinging to her tongue and teeth.  
  
"Dawn?" Anya is saying from close behind her. She's crossed the kitchen without Dawn noticing and is hovering nearby. Her face, when Dawn turns, is worried, uncertain. She's out of her league and she shifts uncomfortably from foot to foot.  
  
"It's so lonely without her," Dawn whispers, looking down at her bare legs and khaki shorts. "Which is stupid, because she wasn't even living here for most of the last few months. And now I get to see you and Buffy and Xander so much more, but --"  
  
"I know" Anya says softly. "Even when I walk into a room and Buffy is there or you are or anybody ... it's not the same, because it's not Xander. And even when it is, it's not *my* Xander, he's not going to smile at me or hold my hand ..." Her voice almost breaks.  
  
"Do you miss Tara?" Dawn asks softly, because she doesn't know what to say about Xander and she thinks if she goes on another moment feeling like she's the only one who even notices she's gone, she might scream or explode into some giant green ball of Key energy or do something equally dramatic.  
  
"Yes," Anya says without hesitating. "I liked Tara."  
  
Dawn blinks at her. "Really?"  
  
"Yes. She knew a lot about magic; she used to give me good suggestions about things to stock. And she understood about ... about Willow and Xander and knowing you're always going to be on the outside. And she never treated me like I was the stupid demon everyone else did."  
  
Dawn looks away again, feels her eyes swimming and wills the tears away.  
  
"What do you *do*?" she asks and turns back to Anya who's biting her lower lip. "How do you make the hurting stop?"  
  
"I don't know," Anya says simply, and Dawn is grateful that she doesn't try to talk about time or embracing life or any of the other cheerful little truisms everyone's been saying to her for the past year. "You ... you find the things that make you feel good and you hold onto them as best you can, because you don't know when you'll get another."  
  
"Like Buffy with Spike?" she asks, and then her eyes widen. "Like *you* and -- ohh." She thinks maybe this is something they shouldn't be talking about, but it seems to bother Anya less than thinking of Xander. She's standing close, and Dawn can smell her perfume, something light and citrusy. She still makes every effort to seem the picture-perfect human girl, and for an instant Dawn can identify with her entirely. Her lip gloss and Anya's sundress and everything in between are all dedicated to creating these fragile images of normalcy and humanity where none exists in either of them.  
  
They're about the same height now, and Dawn idly wonders for the thousandth time whether she'll be taller than absolutely everyone she knows by the time she finishes growing. For now, though, she's eye-to-eye with Anya, who reaches up to touch her shoulder, resting her hand slightly awkwardly on the strap of her tanktop, but then she seems to relax into the feeling of Dawn's skin under her fingertips.  
  
"I feel so old, Anya," Dawn says. "Isn't that stupid? I'm the youngest teenager in the world and I feel so *tired* and ... ancient."  
  
She expects her to laugh, say something about her centuries as a demon, but she surprises her by shaking her head.  
  
"It's not stupid," she says. "Sometimes I feel like the time I spent with Xander was more than all the years I did vengeance. Plus," she adds. "You are old. You're older than me, really."  
  
Dawn blinks at that, but it's true, she supposes. And that's something you have to admit -- whatever Anya says is always backed up by fact. Eternally practical.  
  
"Anya --" she starts, not entirely sure what she's going to say. Thank you, perhaps, but Anya is looking at her strangely.  
  
"Shhh ..." she says and Dawn stops talking and looks at her. "You're so pretty, Dawn," Anya says. "Really. People don't say that enough. All girls ought to be told how pretty they are."  
  
And then she's kissing Dawn, her lips warm and gentle and undeniably *real*. She's softer than Kevin was, and less insistent, and when Dawn opens her mouth, Anya's tongue slips inside to explore her so carefully. She's *cool*, not at all like Kevin's all-over chill, but with residual coldness from the ice cubes she's been crunching. She tastes like tea and lemon, vaguely bitter yet familiar tastes which chase away the cloying chocolate lingering in her mouth. When she pulls back, Dawn's lower lip slipping from between hers last of all, Dawn whimpers at the loss of contact. She breathes for a moment and then opens her eyes.  
  
Anya is looking at her with an expression Dawn can't decipher and for a moment her hand drifts up from Dawn's shoulder to cup her cheek.  
  
"It's all going to be okay," she says, without a trace of forcedness, and from that alone, Dawn can believe her.  
  
She turns and is gone in a moment, leaving Dawn staring after her. After a minute she turns back to where her fudgesicle has melted away almost entirely. She looks at it blankly before dropping the stained wooden stick into the sink and turning on the faucet to wash off her hands. 


End file.
